Retaliation
by UnlessIt'sEvil
Summary: His face was unsettlingly blank as he said, "You were going to kiss someone else. In front of me. As revenge." She made a face. "Well when you put it that way, it sounds rather petty." / / one-shot, Mary/Francis, alternate ending to 1x05


_This is my first Reign fic, so I can only hope I did the characters justice. It's of course hard to accurately portray them when we only have five episodes to go on._

_This is an alternate ending to last night's episode, A Chill in the Air, and here nothing happened between Mary and Bash, because I only brotp ship them thankyouverymuch. It's a fix-it fic._

_I hope you'll enjoy it. (:_

_(Also, the ending sucks, and I know, and I'm gonna revise it as soon as I come up with something.)_

~o**O**o~

One of the hardest things about being a queen was the sheer amount of expectations people had of her. Not to mention the quality of said expectations. The expectations were high. Very high. Higher than Mary could signal with her arm up above her head, pointing to a random piece of air which she has to jump to reach. Higher than even that.

When she told this to boy trying to snatch a bottle of wine from the table, he simply looked bemused, and it was soon becoming clear to her that he had no comprehension of how high that high really was. No, he didn't understand. Nobody seemed to. Well, Francis did. But Francis was… Francis. She didn't want to talk about Francis right now. She didn't even want to think about him. His name was poison, she decided, and therefore she was not to think of it.

One more glass of wine, and that resolution went straight out the window. She couldn't stop the thoughts from circling around her dizzy head. Thoughts of how it didn't matter how much Francis supposedly loved her (or claimed to love her, really—the details on that particular matter were suddenly even fuzzier than her vision, which was very fuzzy, much like how very high the aforementioned expectations were) nothing mattered because he was still going to take a mistress. He said he loved Mary, said he wanted to marry her, and then Olivia came along and things changed.

"Ale, why is there no ale?" she wondered aloud, earning her some odd glances from her peers. She squinted at them. When nobody answered her question concerning the ale, she stumbled along into the ever-moving crowds of the festival, getting caught up in the tide of bodies and not bothering to escape from it. It wasn't like she could, if she tried. For some reason her feet just weren't doing what she wanted them to do. Her feet were dumb. Much like Francis. He was dumb too. Dumb Francis and his dumb mistress could go make dumb bastard babies for all Mary cared. She was done, over it, over him, and she was going to prove it, dammit.

She nearly tripped over her skirt and face-first into the hay when an idea occurred to her: she would give that dumb fiancé of hers a taste of his own medicine. That would serve his dumb face right.

She was going to revenge snog someone. Yes, snog. Not just kiss, or peck, or anything that virginal. No, she was going to bite and lick and grope and do dirty, dirty things to teach Francis a lesson. She wasn't going to sleep with someone, obviously. She wasn't about to step into Olivia's footsteps.

Having made her decision, Mary set out into the crowds once more, trying to pay more attention this time as to find a sufficient victim—err, willing participant—to set her plan in motion. Hopefully it could happen right in front of Francis, so he could see just what he was missing by coupling with that heathen Olivia instead of his future bloody wife.

God, they were going to get married. And they were going to be miserable all because she loved him more than he could clearly ever love her.

She had been staring at this one handsome fellow's face for a bit longer than could be deemed appropriate—which in itself was actually most appropriate, as it was her motive to do highly inappropriate things to said lad—when she bumped into the back of the person she had been walking behind. The man had stopped too abruptly for her to react, especially in her inebriated state.

When he turned around, she scowled. "Your face is dum—dub—dumb," she promptly informed him as soon as she realized it was Francis, and before his own expression could go from annoyed to bewildered, she shouldered past him in an unladylike fashion and stomped into the castle.

"Wait, what? Mary—Mary, wait!" The sound of his voice followed her, and soon so did his footsteps. She led him into an empty hallway, where he grabbed her by the arm and spun her around with a frown. She grinned at him, widely and possibly slightly manically, and it only made his frown deepen.

"Mary," he said again, softer this time. "Mary, are you drunk?"

She hiccup-laughed. "Drunk? Me? Nah." She waved him off, almost hitting him in the face with her miscalculated hand gesture. "I'm a lady, ladies don't do such imporp—iprop—uh. What's the word?"

Francis shook her head. It was a gesture of disappointment, and it made the wine in her stomach feel uncomfortably heavy. "You are most definitely drunk. Let me walk you to your room before you do something foolish."

She felt panicked at the prospect. "No!" She shook her arm loose from his grasp, leaving him staring at her, shocked. "I have a plan!" she announced loudly, and accidentally dropped the wineglass she didn't even know she was holding when she threw her arms to the side for the dramatic effect, because it was absolutely imperative that Francis knew the importance and most of all brilliance of her genius plan. "I'm goin' to revenge snog! Everyone!" She paused. "Well, no, that's. No. I'm goin' to revenge snog one person. I don't know who, but someone, and I'm goin' to make you watch, and you'll know how it feels."

She swayed on the spot for a bit, and reconsidered her previous statement. "I shouldn' 'have told you that. Defeats the purp—purpose."

His face was unsettlingly blank as he said, "You were going to kiss someone else. In front of me. As revenge."

She made a face. "Well when you put it that way, it sounds rather petty." She pointed an accusatory finger at him. "'M not petty. 'M also not goin' to sit around while you do sexy, love make-y things to your mistress and all I get is un—unreq—unrequi—I don't know how to say that word."

Francis took a step towards her. "Unrequited?" It was spoken softly, and she barely caught it. "As in unrequited feelings? Mary, you, I told you, I told you I rejected Olivia's offer." Yes, he had indeed, but that didn't stop Mary from catching how he said the other woman's name.

"Hmm, you did, but you didn't want to, now did you?" While her voice wasn't steady, her words were not quite as slurred as before. It was as if the emotion had pushed aside the tipsiness, just so it could do its damage on both Mary and Francis. "I see how you look at her, how you say her name. I recognize it from how it is with you and me, but… it's more, isn't it? It's—it's what I feel for you. It's first love. Nothing compares to it."

The look on Francis' face hurt almost more than the way Mary's gut twisted at the thoughts of Francis and Olivia having a future together, one where Mary was there, oh yes, but she didn't matter.

Mary was going to turn into Catherine, and wasn't that a pleasant notion.

Suddenly Francis was right there, right in front of Mary, and it made her dizzy. He grabbed her by the arm again, but much gentler this time. He pulled her along, and she went willingly for a change. She felt drained, like the confession had taken all her energy and booze-induced animation and left behind this numb, weighted sensation all throughout her body and mind. She was just tired, she decided. Sick and tired of this life she was leading here in France. Sick of the alliances, the wars, the court, the nobles and royals. Sick of the things Francis made her feel, and of how little she could do about them.

The exhaustion of the day and the amount of wine she had taken became too much, and when her knees gave out, her eyes slipped shut, and she was blissfully shrouded in the darkness of sleep.

~o**O**o~

The light of the rising sun landed right on her closed eyelids, and she resisted the urge to hiss at it. Instead she groaned, and immediately regretted it as it increased the pounding in her head and made her painfully aware of it. She wanted to clutch at it, but that would involve moving her arm, and moving seemed like a bad idea. If she moved, last night's wine would go out the way it came in, and she didn't really fancy that.

The bed shifted then, and after coming to the realization that she had no recollection of even going to her room, she noted that she herself had not been the cause of the movement. She kind of hoped it was an assassin, because she would do just about anything to get rid of the pain she was in.

A hand went under her head to lift it gently, and the pressure was a familiar one. It calmed her, though she couldn't place it just then. Next, she felt something cold against her lower lip—the rim of a glass. She whined pathetically, not wanting to drink any more. She heard a shushing sound and then, blessedly softly, Francis' whisper in her ear. "It's a tincture I got from Nostradamus, for the headache and the illness. Drink it, it'll make you feel better."

She did as told, and forced herself to swallow the liquid that tasted so foul as it went down, it almost made the current contents of her stomach come up. She wanted to open her eyes, to look at Francis, to feast on the vision he never failed to make, but at the same time she didn't want to face him. Knowing he was here, though, taking care of her, already made her feel better both physically and emotionally. And she kind of loathed herself for it.

The hand under her head shifted as he slowly lowered her back onto the pillow. He stroked her hair for a few moments, and she wondered what he was thinking about. He then almost reverently trailed a single finger down her cheek, and his breath was puffing out against her ear. "Get some more rest," he told her. "I'll come check on you later."

She was asleep before she could thank him.

~o**O**o~

When she awoke next, she was feeling significantly better. The light didn't hurt her closed eyes, and her headache had faded to a dull throb that she could easily ignore. She also didn't feel like she would be sick all over the bed, which actually brought the issue at hand to the front of her mind.

How had she reached her bed?

The last thing she remembered was arguing with Francis, dredging up her emotions and spilling them all over him in a way that was nothing short of embarrassing. And—

—oh, lord, she was going to revenge kiss someone.

And she told Francis about it.

Her eyes slammed open at the memory and she immediately squeezed them shut again, because there he was. Francis. Sitting at the side of her bed, staring at her with a blank face. Wonderful.

She hesitantly opened her eyes again, and noticed how his eyebrows were a bit higher up on his forehead than before.

But not as high as the expectations, she thought dryly. It made her want to giggle dementedly, and she was starting to suspect that Nostradamus' tincture had a special little side effect of its own.

"Good morning," she finally croaked, breaking the fragile silence that had surrounded the engaged couple.

"How are you feeling?" was Francis' response. It sounded cold, distant, and the sickness returned with a vengeance.

"Just peachy," she mumbled, and tried to burrow her face into her pillow, as if to hide from Francis' heavy gaze. He didn't say anything else, and the quiet made her nervous. So she talked: "Aylee is going to give me a lecture and tell me she told me so, and she is going to do it loudly just to make her point. And then she is going to somehow bribe me into wearing an uncomfortably tight dress that will ensure the nausea doesn't leave, and she and the girls will laugh at my expense. I really need new friends." She pouted at this fate.

"Well you're certainly feeling better, what with the rambling." Francis' voice pulled her from dreading her situation, and she gave him a small, sheepish smile.

"The nuns would make jokes about how I was born talking. Even before I could really speak, I would be jabbering like there was no tomorrow." Which made her think of how, in fact, every day could possibly be her last.

Court had turned her into quite the pessimist.

Instead of the smile she had hoped to cause on Francis' face, there was a frown. "You certainly said a lot of things last night," he said, and she could almost feel the color draining out of her face. "I especially remember when you told me about your devious plan to kiss someone."

She thought that maybe, if she did it slowly enough, he wouldn't notice her creeping underneath the covers. It didn't work, and she heard him huff, though it sounded more amused than annoyed. He grabbed the covers she was pulling over her head and uncovered her face for him to lean over.

"Mary," he said. "You also told me how you thought… you thought I was going to take Olivia as my mistress. I. I'm sorry if I didn't do enough to assure you—Mary, I don't want her. Not anymore. Not now I have you."

She shook her head as much as she could while lying down, and the motion made their noses bump. "No, no, it's not your fault. You did tell me, I just didn't listen. I was stupid and stuck up and so drunk about it, and I should have trusted you, because I do—trust you, that is. I don't know why I didn't last night, but it won't happen again." She gave him a wide smile. "I'll eat more next time, yes? Perhaps I was so cranky because I was hungry. There was also the wine; that didn't exactly help my mood."

He grinned back at her, and the warmth it filled her with was exquisite.

"I could tell. You called me dumb."

She tried hiding under the covers again, and his laughter followed her there.

~o**O**o~

_Reviews are always appreciated, because constructive criticism is a good thing. Also, confidence boosts are a good thing, so if you like it, I'd like to know. (:_

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